"Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it."
Edmund Burke. What happened on this Day in History?

Monday, October 14, 2013

Ths Day in History: Oct 14, 1947: Yeager breaks sound barrier

U.S. Air Force Captain Chuck Yeager becomes the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound.
Yeager, born in Myra, West Virginia, in 1923, was a combat fighter during World War II
and flew 64 missions over Europe. He shot down 13 German planes and was
himself shot down over France, but he escaped capture with the
assistance of the French Underground. After the war, he was among
several volunteers chosen to test-fly the experimental X-1 rocket plane, built by the Bell Aircraft Company to explore the possibility of supersonic flight.

For years, many aviators believed that man was not meant to fly
faster than the speed of sound, theorizing that transonic drag rise
would tear any aircraft apart. All that changed on October 14, 1947,
when Yeager flew the X-1 over Rogers Dry Lake in Southern California. The X-1
was lifted to an altitude of 25,000 feet by a B-29 aircraft and then
released through the bomb bay, rocketing to 40,000 feet and exceeding
662 miles per hour (the sound barrier at that altitude). The rocket
plane, nicknamed "Glamorous Glennis," was designed with thin, unswept
wings and a streamlined fuselage modeled after a .50-caliber bullet.

Because of the secrecy of the project, Bell and Yeager's achievement
was not announced until June 1948. Yeager continued to serve as a test
pilot, and in 1953 he flew 1,650 miles per hour in an X-1A rocket plane. He retired from the U.S. Air Force in 1975 with the rank of brigadier general.